In recent years, multiple functions have rapidly been developed for mobile communications terminals such as mobile telephones. Lately, built-in camera mobile telephones, which have a CCD (Charge Coupled Device) camera that employs semiconductor photodetectors for converting light into electrical signals, are coming into wide use.
Built-in camera mobile telephones are convenient in terms of that a user can take them along anywhere and photograph desired objects anytime with ease. Here, “to photograph” represents a process of forming an image of an object on the surface of a semiconductor photodetector through a lens of a camera and converting the formed image into image data.
A CCD camera is arranged on the rear side of such built-in camera mobile telephone. The object image photographed by the CCD camera is displayed on a liquid crystal screen provided on the front side of the mobile telephone. This enables the user to see the image of the photographed object on the liquid crystal screen on the spot. Furthermore, the user can store the photographed object image in the mobile telephone, or send it to his/her friends and family by email.
Recently, however, such convenient built-in camera mobile telephones are often misused to take sneak shots, which poses a social problem. Also, built-in camera mobile telephones are made foldable so that they become compact. While this makes the built-in camera mobile telephones even more convenient, this causes apprehension about increase in the attempts of taking sneak shots using such increasingly convenient folding built-in camera mobile telephones.